


And He Built a Crooked House

by bench



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Implied Sexual Content, M/M, sort of a haunted house i guess??
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-19
Updated: 2013-09-19
Packaged: 2017-12-27 01:42:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/972824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bench/pseuds/bench
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos gets along great with Cecil, but not so well with Cecil's house.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And He Built a Crooked House

The first time you visited Cecil at his home you didn't really notice that anything was particularly unusual about it except for a nagging sense of unease, which Cecil naturally caught on to immediately. One of the many things that makes Cecil an excellent reporter is his ability to read people's emotions. Most of the time this is great. He knows you are tired before you do, knows when you have been sitting working on your experiments for far too long even if you are only texting, knows when you want to go to bed even when you are too awkward to say it in words. This is one of the many things you love about Cecil.

So the first time you came over and Cecil cooked you dinner and you sat on his couch together arm in arm and talked for hours about the strange phenomenon that is Night Vale, it was, for the most part, wonderful. But the entire night one corner of your mind itched with the knowledge that something wasn't quite right. And as the night went on Cecil grew more and more subdued as your anxiety failed to abate and, you know now, he assumed that you were uncomfortable with _him_. The idea that open, kindhearted Cecil could ever make you uncomfortable is as absurd as it is untrue.

Cecil talked at length on the radio the next day over the protests of station management about the "disastrous" date, and how he was sure yours was a relationship destined to tragic brevity. You were quick to dissuade him of the notion, but the knowledge that Cecil's house caused such an unfortunate upheaval in what had been a very pleasant and straightforward (for Night Vale) courtship lead you to decline to go over to Cecil's as much as you could manage within the bounds of polite refusal.

Unfortunately, you couldn't possibly avoid the house all together, and as weeks and months went by you came to gradually see what it was about the house that bothered you so. The walls were never quite the same color when you arrived as they were the last time you left. The hallways seemed to grow ever so slightly longer as you walked their lengths. In a most cliché turn of events, the eyes in all of the paintings appeared to follow you wherever you went. The ceiling never seemed to maintain a consistent height, the fireplace either put off far more or less heat than it ought, and the ancient glass of the windows appeared to warp the view in a slow, undulating motion.

There was only one solution to this problem, and that was to confirm, through scientific inquiry, that there never was a problem to begin with. So you took to bringing your thermometer and measuring tape whenever you came over. You measured the sizes of the rooms, the lengths of the halls, and the height of the ceiling. You tested the temperature in each corner of each room several times throughout the course of each evening you spent with Cecil. Unfortunately, this only served to confirm your worst suspicions.

The entire time you had been preforming your experiments, Cecil had been looking on bemusedly. He has told you time and time again that he loves to see you working on your scientific passions and assured you that he did not mind your measuring of his house, but insisted that it would get you nowhere. Well it did get you somewhere, it confirmed that Cecil's house is, well, crooked. It too deviates from the laws of nature as so many things in Night Vale do. It wasn't a surprise so much as a disappointment.

When you told Cecil of his houses' peculiarities he explained, with the same infinite patience that he explains all Night Vale phenomena, that his house is simply old. It has been in his family for many, many years and no number of re-models can take away the strangeness built right into the foundation. If there is one thing that you have come to understand about Night Vale, it is that the older a thing is, the stranger it is, unless it is very, mysteriously, new. Things in Night Vale seem to become more or less inundated with the bizarre miasma of the town over time such that the strangest occurrences happen at the oldest locales throughout the city. The library has stood at the same corner for several hundreds of years in its various forms and it is difficult to argue that a more unusual site is to be found in Night Vale. Or perhaps not that difficult to argue. Frankly, a different site is the strangest from week to week without consistent pattern, but the librarians have been particularly rambunctious lately.

So you force yourself to accept Cecil's house for what it is: yet another inexplicable Night Vale oddity. You try to ignore the prying eyes of the paintings and the rooms that are never quite the same shape as last time and the way Cecil's cloths seem to organize _themselves_ by color. You fail at this attempt, but you can at least assure yourself that it is not through lack of effort.

You gradually resign yourself to the fact that you will never really be comfortable in Cecil's house, but it is entirely worth the discomfort to be able to be with Cecil.

Cecil really loves to talk. This is another of the many things you love about Cecil. Part of what makes him excel at radio broadcasting is that he is simply doing what he loves do to most, and what he is best at. His reporting is usually careful and thorough, and his words of reason can calm the citizens of Night Vale through the most absurd of crises. Cecil's show, you have gradually come to understand, is a cornerstone of the Night Vale community, and it gives you a little thrill every time he turns his sonorous voice to you and you alone. You love how his passion and interest and every other though and emotion shows through when he speaks.

But even more, you love that you are the only one who can take his words away. The only time Cecil is really, truly silent is when you are intimate together. When he comes apart over or under or beside you, his words fall away into quiet gasps, lust-glazed eyes, and desperately clinging hands. Even his ever-shifting tattoos still in that long, quiet moment.

During the buildup Cecil is anything but quiet, moaning and gasping and sometimes even shouting in a litany of "oh Gods, oh please, oh yes, oh _Carlos_!"

Maybe this Cecil isn't your favorite Cecil, it is hard to say, but this Cecil is a Cecil only you get to see, and that knowledge fills you with something you can only call love.

And this is the real reason you have come to hate Cecil's house.

When Cecil falls apart it is supposed to be for your eyes alone, not the eyes that you just _know_ infest his home.

So you try to spend as much time at your place as possible. It was built recently and only has a few idiosyncrasies to catch you off guard. However, this absence seems to bother Cecil as much as his crooked house bothers you. On top of this you have no claim to interior decorating ability and Cecil finds your room uncomfortably sterile. You try to compromise by switching between houses but this leaves you both somewhat strained and off center.

Eventually you find yourself utterly fed up with the entire situation and you and Cecil spend over a week thoroughly miserable, only meeting in neutral locations. Then it is brought to you attention that Cecil feels an entirely different aura from his house than you do. After a particularly trying day where a mysterious and apparently bottomless pit opened in the town square and began summoning Night Vale citizens to throw themselves into its depths until ancient gods are appeased, Cecil mentioned that he couldn't wait to return to the warm and loving embrace of his house. You had always assumed that he received the same suspicious and vaguely irritated vibe that you did and he had learned to ignore it, but you should have known better. A good scientist never assumes. You did not want to insult Cecil by accusing his house of being unfriendly, but there is no reason for Cecil to live in an unfriendly house, so of course he felt the house differently than you.

Upon further questioning Cecil explained that when he enters his home he feels a strong wave of welcoming happiness from the building. Every room exudes an aura of comfortable hominess and that’s why he can never be truly content in any house but his own.

When you explained that the house assaults you with emotions of more or less the opposite nature, Cecil theatrically slapped his palm to his forehead and exclaimed that he really should have known that this was the problem. The solution proved to be a simple ritual in the house' bloodstone circle and the whole situation could really be smoothed over in a few hours now that the problem was out in the open like this and you really should have discussed the your discomfort more formally much sooner.

You swung through down town for a few supplies, hands held and smiling the entire way.

You _think_ that the ritual probably was as simple as Cecil assured you it was, but every time you try to think back on it your mind slides away to less important matters like if you are running low on milk or if the invisible clock tower is actually just a mass hallucination caused by a likely contaminated water supply.

The ritual lasted for no more than an hour (probably) and you took Cecil out to dinner at Big Rico's Pizza to celebrate what you assumed was a successful performance. After fulfilling your mandatory weekly dinner at Big Rico's you return to Cecil's house. You walk through the front door and feel… nothing.

Cecil had explained that the ritual would make you invisible to the eyes of the house, and now you should be able to go about your business without such negative interference. The house has, apparently, always been the jealous sort, and it had been trying to chase you away in the only way it knew how. The notion that a mere grumpy house would be enough to scare you from Cecil is rather laughable. It was easy for Cecil to forget the houses' more jealous tendencies when it is so warm and kind to him.

Then he winked and suggested that it might be a good time to make sure the ritual really worked "if you know what I mean" and as you pulled him into a kiss you felt truly at peace.

**Author's Note:**

> I would love to know what you think is the strangest thing in Night Vale is. If you want to share, feel free to post in the comments or send me an ask on [my tumblr](http://a-bench.tumblr.com). Thanks for reading!


End file.
